Those Real-Time Marketing Algos; Facebook's New Big Thing

The New York Times’ Tanzina Vega covers digital audience buying momentum and its effect on big publishers. She writes, “That shift is punishing traditional online publishers, like newspaper, broadcast and magazine sites, who are receiving a much lower percentage of ad dollars as marketers use programmatic buying across a much broader canvas.” Read more. Meanwhile, the NYT’s Natasha Singer looks at the instantaneous side of audience buying, “Ever wonder why that same ad for a car or a couch keeps popping up on your screen? Nearly always, the answer is real-time bidding, an electronic trading system...” Read that one, too.

Big, New Ad Thing

On The Business Insider, Nicholas Carlson cobbles together sources who say that a big Facebook ad product - in partnership with Datalogix - is on the way that could "kill" a "flagship" Yahoo! ad product. Carlson writes, "Our source says this new Facebook product ‘closes the loop' on brand advertising in a way that no site besides Facebook is able. This source gave three reasons Facebook can do this and no one else, including Yahoo, can: Scale, scale, and scale." Read more. But, hold on a second! Late Sunday, UK's Telegraph reports that Yahoo and Facebook may partner such that Yahoo's search relationship with Microsoft will be annulled. Read about it. What a tangled web ad technology weaves.

Consumer Reports' Tracking Trouble

This could be a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing with tracking cookies. Following a message from Consumer Reports President Jim Guest imploring subscribers to take up arms against behavioral targeting mechanisms, AdAge's Kate Kaye did some digging and found that the site has tags from at least 10 third-party trackers. Consumer Reports had no immediate comment. "It's time to stop the unwanted tracking once and for all!" Guest's message said, seemingly unaware that such activity was happening so close to home. Read it.

You Crazy Gamer

Google has games. And Ingress, a new free mobile app and alternate reality game for Android, may turn heads. Naturally, there is an ad component as Ingress will feature offline retailers and products from marketers such as Zipcar and Jamba Juice. "This grew out of us thinking about notions of ubiquitous computing," Hanke told AllThingsD's Liz Gannes. "The device melts away." Read more.

Cracking The Purple Whip

All Things D's Kara Swisher reports that CEO Marissa Mayer is doing away with Yahoo!'s long-held tradition of taking a company-wide holiday between Christmas and New Years'. Swisher also notes "there will be new measurements of performance instituted, based on a variety of benchmarks and evaluations, in order to better understand who the best employees at Yahoo are." And, who aren't. Read more.
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